Diatribe

Diatribe is a weekly opinionative column by Dean Kalimniou, which is published in Melbourne's Neos Kosmos English Edition Newspaper. It deals generally with issues of interest to the Greek Community in Australia.

Saturday, November 30, 2013

GENOCIDE DENIERS AND THEIR CRONIES

Hasan Fehmi Bey:

“Why did we impute the title of murderer to our race? Why did we enter into such decisive and difficult struggle? That was done just for securing the future of our country that we know as more precious and sacred than our lives.”

"The
clearance of race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act could
be...There is no reason to doubt that this crime was planned and executed for
political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil
of a Christian race opposed to all Turkish ambitions." Winston Churchill

ABC
political analyst Michael Brissenden recently tweeted: “Is Parliament House
the right place for genocide deniers. We wouldn’t give a committee room to
David Irving.” He was of course referring to the lecture, booked by Labor
MP Laurie Ferguson, to be given by one of the world's most strident genocide
deniers. Professor Justin McCarthy, an American history academic, who is well
known for his denial of the Armenian, and by implication, Assyrian and Greek
genocide in Anatolia. According to Michael Brissenden, he is considered by
Armenians to be what David Irving is to the Jewish Holocaust.

Interestingly
enough, the same gentleman was scheduled to speak at the University of
Melbourne and the Art Gallery of NSW. However, after certain interested members
of the public drew the University and the Gallery’s attention to both the
content of the lecture and Justin McCarthy’s active campaigning against
genocide recognition, it was announced that the lecture was not to take place.

Of
late, the campaign for Australian recognition of the Armenian, Assyrian and
Greek Genocides has intensified and the issue has reached the Australian
mainstream like never before. Further, the Australian media are beginning to
realise both the enormity of the crime and the fact that it involved not just
the Armenians, but also other Christian peoples of Anatolia. Thus, in his
recent report on Lateline, Michael Brissended took pains to point out that: “Although
it's known as the Armenian genocide, thousands of Assyrians and Pontian Greeks
were also killed.” Hundreds of thousands would have been a more accurate
description but the fact that this connection is being made at all, is
encouraging for all those activists who campaign for recognition of what is, a
crime that has largely gone unrecognised. Furthermore, as we have seen this
year, more and more Australians have become indignant at the manner in which
the Turkish government seeks to quash a groundswell of Australian public
support for the recognition of the genocide, by seeking to hold the Gallipoli
celebrations to ransom.As the Speaker
of the Turkish Grand National Assembly Mr Cemil Cicek has stated: "One
of only two things … could disrupt good relations between Turkey and
Australia." One is for Australia "to support any claims about
genocide without hearing the Turkish side ... this could cause huge rifts
between the nations and even jeopardise commemorations around Gallipoli."
In handling this matter so clumsily, all they have managed to do, is to show
the Australian public, that they have something to hide. As NSW Premier Barry O
‘Farrell comments: ''It's deplorable anyone associated with the Turkish
government would try and use next year's centenary of the Gallipoli landing for
political purposes.''

Such
attempts at bullying are not new. Australian scholars who study the genocide
have been known to receive abusive emails and threats from genocide deniers and
this is especially so if they belong to an ethnic community that was a victim
of the genocide. Leading genocide recognition campaigner Dr Panayiotis Diamadis
has, over the years, been the recipient of a barrage of quite disturbing and
threating emails which have only intensified as the campaign gains momentum and
more and more Australians become sensitive to the issue. Even the Diatribe is
not immune, with one incensed reader writing in to state in May of this year:
“Panayiotis Diamadis & yourself are prime examples of the hypocritical human
(although Diamadis's credentials are highly doubtful) who come across as good
and noble, because you are against genocide, and who is going to argue with
that?

But
in reality, both of you are exploiting human suffering for political and
professional gain. You are determining who the villains and victims are, and
your determinants have little to do with legitimate history. In addition, by
avoiding the crimes perpetrated by those you have designated as the victims,
you are telling us that one people are more worthy than another.

Some
may call that “human rights” "search for justice" etc., but by
choosing the better human group (one side is completely bad, the other
completely good), what both of you are advocating might be better termed as
“racism.”

We have
taken note of your racist attitude.”

My
response was to point out that in previous articles I have not shied away from
discussing Greek brutalities committed upon innocent Turkish civilians during
the 1821 War of Independence and challenged the writers to meet me in the
middle by condemning the brutalities committed by their own people. I received
no response and of course it seems far beyond the bullies to realise that if we
are to prevent genocide, we must condemn it in all its forms. This has nothing
to do with asserting the relative merits of one race over another. History has
shown that we are all capable of the heinous as well as the sublime. The manner
in which we acknowledge faults and take steps not to repeat them, forms a
measure of our humanity. The apology to the Stolen Generations of indigenous
Australians is a prime example. The inverse is true when we try to cover up
crimes.

Given
these gross attempts to sweep under the carpet, a genocide for which there is
ample contemporary eyewitness and documentary evidence, evidence that even
Turkish scholars such as Taner Akcam openly acknowledge as condemnatory, the
fact that a Labor MP would use the chief symbol of Australian democracy as a
forum for a genocide denier to promote his views is mystifying and thoroughly
hurtful. At first glance, it reeks of Orientalism. According to this view,
Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks rank lower in the hierarchy of races, so that
any event of concern to them is of lesser importance to the mainstream than it
would have been if the same event had been visited upon other “high ranking
races.” This may provide an extra dimension to Joe Hockey’s 2011 comment: “The
Armenian genocide ''is one of the least known, least understood and least
respected human tragedies of the modern era''. Accordingly, politicians and
others can use such events to play politics or curry favour with interest
groups, knowing that the public outcry will not be significant or politically
damaging. Further, as the Executive Council of Australian Jewry points out in a
recent letter, there is a fine line between freedom of speech and racial
vilification. The council supports the contention that hundreds of thousands of
Armenians were slaughtered with “genocidal intent,” and argues that Parliament
is being “misused” by acting as a forum for the genocide deniers in question.

Michael
Brissenden’s insightful Lateline report, as well as his inspired ‘tweet’
highlight the dangers of such a trivial approach to important historical
events. This also marks a watershed in the campaign for genocide recognition as
the Australian public begins to question the appropriateness of using important
and respected Australian institutions for the purposes of subverting traumatic
events. Laurie Ferguson, who declined to comment to Lateline, would do well to
spend some time with the survivors of genocide and their descendants. He should
hear accounts of Armenian orphans forced into Turkish orphanages in Syria and
beaten when they spoke their mother tongue, during their process of
Turkification. He should read the chilling accounts of Hasan Fehmi, who wrote: “Why
did we impute the title of murderer to our race? Why did we enter into such
decisive and difficult struggle? That was done just for securing the future of
our country that we know as more precious and sacred than our lives.” He
should also have regard to Halil Pasha who wrote: "The Armenian nation,
which I had tried to annihilate to the last member of it…if you… try to betray
Turks and the Turkish homeland, I will order my forces which surround all your
country and I won't leave even a single breathing Armenian all over the earth.
Get your mind." Then he should be asked what qualifications or special
insights he possesses that permit him to encourage the denial of the massacre
of millions and whether he believes that insulting the memories of over a
million innocent victims of a massacre and their descendants is appropriate for
a member of the Australian parliament. The party that he represents should also
be asked the same question. In the meantime, the clock is ticking, and with
every passing moment, more and more Australians are looking to their elected
representatives to do the right thing: To honour the victims of imperialism,
racism and brutality. After all, their ancestors fought for them and it is upon
this foundation that our nation is based.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

THESSALONIANS AND JEWS

Last week, the Thessaloniki Association “White
Tower,” in the course of various annual events celebrating the liberation of
Thessaloniki and the sisterhood between that city and that of Melbourne,
organised a lecture on the topic of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, which
yours truly was asked to deliver.

The choice of topic created somewhat of a stir
within sections of the community. “That’s a very brave choice of topic,” one
pundit opined. “You will be criticised for this,” another cautioned. It is easy
to see why such caveats were placed on what is ostensibly, an innocuous topic.
Thessaloniki is, after all, the capital of Macedonia, a region considered
central to various competing ethnic identities. Accordingly, for some, any
suggestion that any ethnic group other than the Greeks may have played an
intrinsic role in the history of that city, seems to compromise their
conception of Macedonia as a purely Hellenic construct. Furthermore, according
to a few misguided individuals, Jewish culture is inimically opposed to Greek
culture, having had a corrosive influence upon it, and thus one should not draw
attention to it and quite the opposite, actively oppose it.

That the Jewish and Greek cultures are inextricably
linked in an aeons long dialogue and dialectic cannot be denied. From the time
the Philistines, who were a Cretan, early Greek speaking people, set foot in
the land of Canaan, both cultures have come into conflict with each other,
influenced and informed each other. In Hellenistic times, Jewish rabbis were
concerned with the level of Hellenisation of their youth and the penetration of
Greek philosophic ideas into their religion. In Alexandria, a truly
multicultural city, the extremely large and prominent Jewish community largely
adopted the Greek language, making the translation of the Old Testament into
Greek necessary, culminating in the Septuagint, which has exercised a profound
influence over the development of Greek literature as well as Greek
Christianity. In the same period, Hellenised Jewish philosophers such as Philo
are making immense contributions to philosophy.

In many ways, Alexandria, a truly multicultural
Hellenistic, as opposed to a Hellenic city, was the prototype for Thessaloniki
and it comes as no surprise to learn that Jews from Alexandria were probably
the first to settle in Thessaloniki. Their continued presence is well-attested
in Roman times by their compatriot St Paul of Tarsus, who visited their
synagogues and preached a new religion to them.

It is widely held that it the prominent place
afforded to the Jews of Thessaloniki was primarily owed to their expulsion from
Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella during the Reconquista, and their resettlement
by a friendly and tolerant Ottoman government. According to this narrative,
Greeks and Christianity were unfriendly towards the Jews, who only flourished
under the rule of the new conquerors. So ingrained is this belief within the psyche
of Thessalonian Greeks that they were pleasantly shocked to learn that there were
few instances of the persecution of Jews within Byzantium and that unlike the
rest of Europe, where continuous and organised acts of harassment and
persecution took place, Jews in Thessaloniki were left alone. In 1176, the
Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela wrote an account of the city in which we
spoke of a Jewish community of 500, serviced by three rabbis. In the following
years, the Jewish community of the city was constantly being replenished by
other European Jews fleeing the depredations of their European persecutors. In
1376, Ashkenazi Jews fleeing progroms in Hungary and Germany would find their
way into the city and in 1394, Jews fleeing Provence would also settle in the
city, along with Jews from Italy in the period between 1423 to 1430. The composition
and constitution of Thessaloniki’s Jewry was thus as complex and tribal as our
own Greek community here in Melbourne, each with its own synagogues and welfare
centres, based on the place of their original embarkation.

Being already known as a safe haven for at least
one hundred years, the 20,000 expelled Jews of Spain chose Thessaloniki as
their destination in 1492. They brought with them an immense array of skills
and their own language, a Spanish-Hebrew hybrid known as Ladino, written in the
Hebrew alphabet, which would remain as one of the main languages spoken in
Thessaloniki right up until the end of the Second World War.

The Thessalonians who attended the lecture did not
seem to be perturbed by the fact that the Jews of Thessaloniki made the city so
much their own that in 1537, visiting Jewish poet from Ferrara Samuel Uscue
named the city: “The Mother of Israel.” Nor were they particular disturbed to
learn that between them the Jewish synagogues of their city managed to obtain a
contract with the Ottoman government to exclusively supply the army with cloth,
thus ensuring the financial security of the community. On the contrary, they exclaimed in
appreciation. One psychiatrist, recently arrived from Thessaloniki, was
surprised and delighted to learn of the existence of a Jewish run psychiatric
asylum known as Lieto Noah, decades before the existence of a similar
government institution anywhere within the bounds of what became the modern
Greek state. Further, the revelation that at the turn of the nineteenth
century, the 70,000 strong Jewish community of Thessaloniki was the largest
ethno-religious group, at about 50% of the population did not seem in anyway to
compromise their understanding of their own city.

There appeared to be no need to cast the Jews in
the light of a loyal minority working in the interests of the Greek state. The
audience was able to learn that the Young-Turk movement, which was founded in
Thessaloniki, also included some Islamised Jews within its ranks and among its
ideologues but this did not unduly disturb them. In learning that the Jewish
socialist party in Thessalinki “Federacion” was a vital early constituent of
the Communist Party of Greece, they did not even bat an eyelid. In true
Thessalonian cosmopolitan fashion, they accepted this nugget of history as part
of their own, and placed it within context accordingly.

It was when describing the trials and travails of
the Jewish population at the hands of the Nazis that I was almost moved to
tears. The members of the audience let out audible groans, shifted their legs
uncomfortably, clucked their tongues and shook their heads as they heard how
the Jews were duped into providing a full census of themselves and their
property holdings, only to have this serve as the means to dispossess them of
everything they owned and finally, lead them to their tragic end. They were
also fascinated to learn that in 1955, in the aftermath of the pogrom against
the Greeks of Constantinople, a few Jews who were affected by that brutal bout
of ethnic cleansing, sought refuge in Thessaloniki. Fascination turned to
wonderment when they learned that local writer Tom Petsinis has written and
produced an acclaimed play, entitled “Salonika Bound,” dealing with the legacy
of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki in Melbourne.

At this point the audience did two remarkable
things. In the first instance, they began to share their own memories of the
Jews in Thessaloniki. Some related how their parents were entrusted with
valuables by Jews and kept them for years, vainly excepting their friends’
return. Others spoke of playing or hiding in the cavities of destroyed Jewish
tombs and others yet, of their parents attempts to save or hide Jews from the
genocidal mania of the Nazis. Remarkably, a few spoke of chance meetings here
in multicultural Melbourne with Jews originally from Thessaloniki, taking great
pains to emphasise the love and sense of loss they expressed towards that city.
This was a generation that had only a passing and limited acquaintance or contact
with the Jews of Thessaloniki and yet their destruction left a void and a
longing in the souls of Thessalonians that endures even to the present.

Subsequently, it was spontaneously resolved that a
commemorative event of the nature of the lecture, would be useless without the
presence of those it was commemorating. As such, the Thessalonians excitedly
discussed the prospect of formally instituting an annual commemorative event to
honour the Jews of Thessaloniki, to which members of the Melbourne Jewish community
would be invited. In short, supported by the indefatigable State Member for
Northern Metropolitan,Jenny Mikakos,
they are now attempting to reconstitute their own ideal of a multicultural,
tolerant Thessaloniki in the heart of multicultural, tolerant Melbourne. This
is the Greek spirit at its finest.

If anything is to be learned from such an occasion,
surely it is this: Though the first generation Greek migrant may be
opinionated, bigoted and given to conspiracy theories, such opinion are worn lightly
upon their sleeve, for the self-same Greek is also generous, hospitable, and
having endured more trials and travails that they would care to mention, unless
of course they are lecturing their young, compassionate, sympathetic to the
plight of others and able to embrace all. It is that love of life and of
humanity that exists in the Thessalonians of Melbourne in spades. Until next
week, then, le chaim!

Saturday, November 16, 2013

FILM FESTIVALS AND ΑΓΕΛΑΔΕΣ

"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."

Alfred Hitchcock

I have had an idea for a movie for a very long time and have already written the screenplay. It involves a corpulent and hirsute Athenian setting off of for the Varvakeios market, there to buy the drawn and quartered components of a cow. Upon his return from the said market, clutching blood stained plastic bags, he arranges everything on his kitchen table. Then, to the accompaniment of Mozart's Requiem, he sets to work with needle and thread, re-constituting the dripping pieces of meat and bone into their archetypal bovine form. Just as he manages to sew a cowhide over the gruesome form, he caresses the cow's horns, steps back and admires his handiwork. Subsequently, he leans forward towards the cows jaws and intones sonorously: "Moooooo!" I entitle this work of avant garde cinema "Pygmalion," and it is a deconstruction of the myth of the Cypriot king Pygmalion and his quest to find perfection in the statue of Galatea. It is also as post-modern commentary on the aspirations of the Modern Greeks in their search for an identity. Most importantly, it serves as an outlet for one of my not so readily defensible tenets of belief: that all art is butchery.

Sadly, the local film directors I have spoken to have seemed reluctant to challenge themselves in the creation of such a ground-breaking motion picture, citing budget constraints and ethical reservations, despite the fact that I am willing to interpose between the credits, a disclaimer that states that no animal was unduly inconvenienced during the making of the same. Lamentably, I readily believe that it shall be doomed never to see the light of any screen, except the silk screen behind which I will endeavour to enact it with shadow puppets, as a sideshow to a future Antipodean Greek Film Festival launch, possibly the thirtieth anniversary of the same, in tribute to its fine work in presenting to a wide audience, a broad cross section of Greek film and as a symbol of our desperate need to deconstruct and thus understand our cultural heritage. Meanwhile, the screenplay for my film about three Oakleigh ultranationalists who, fed up with the British refusal to hand over the Elgin Marbles resolve to travel to London and steal them themselves, is currently being written.

This year, of course, marks the twentieth anniversary of what has become both an institution and a highlight of the Melburnian cultural calendar. The Greek Film Festival, a flagship event of the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria has in that time, been embraced not only by the Greek community at large but also, by the broader community as well. It is easy to see why. Going to the movies is passive and anonymous. Further, the silver screen, accompanied by subtitles, provides a general and easily accessible insight into the complexities, assumptions and contexts of Modern Greek life, without demanding much in return and this is why Jim Morrison observed that film spectators are quiet vampires. Thus, in many ways, the Greek Film Festival is nothing more than the evolution of the nineteen eighties staple pastime of the whole family congregating in large numbers at a designated uncle's house, simply because he had in his possession, power and/or custody, the latest VHS release from Stavros Video. Today, the family is the entire Greek community and it is the good chairpersons of the Greek Film Festival, along with their cohorts, familiars and retainers who are so generously doing the sharing.

The popular success of the Greek Film Festival seems counter-intuitive. One would have thought that the advent of Greek satellite television and its accessibility to a multitude of Greek-Australian homes would have spelled the end for the need for organised viewings, such viewings being more easily undertaken in the comfort and privacy of one's home. Militating against this view however are two key factors, firstly that Greek commercial television programming is so inane and toxic that relief in the form of alternative forms of visual media is a necessity and secondly, the nature and character of our community as an intricate connection of personal and institutional networks that coalesce into a large family construct, is such that the need for large, broad based viewing events has increased rather than diminished. It says much for the cultural sensitivity and grass-roots contact with our community possessed by the chairpersons of the Greek Film Festival, the aethereal and multifaceted Tammy Iliou and the irrepressibly suave and debonair Leonidas Vlahakis, as well as its director, the inexpressibly omniscient Penny Kyprianou, that they have, during their able and inspired administration, presided over a Film Festival that is not so arty and obscure so as to be rendered elitist and inaccessible and at the same time, not so trashy and pedestrian as to be rendered irrelevant. In the least, they inspire infinitely more confidence in us than the great Christina Aguilera who famously asked: "So where is the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?" Instead, their careful selection and presentation of films endeavours to present the latest development in Modern Greek film, with all of the cultural baggage that is contained therein.

In doing so, they have provided us with some of the finest moments of our collective experience, throughout the years. I will never forget the beaming feel-good smiles of the audience emerging from the cautionary classic: «ΗΚάλπικηΛύρα.» Similarly, the group tears and cries of passion emerging unsolicited from the audience and in unison during the screening of "Touch of Spice" or "Brides," were I believe, moments of historical importance for our sense of community. Finally, I will never forget watching elderly viewers squirm and shield their eyes while watching homosexual acts between a young boy masquerading as a nun and an escaped Janissary in the thoroughly disturbing and engrossing "Black Field." The tension in the cinema reached a crescendo as the love scenes became more pronounced. Then, during a scene where the boy, straddling the Janissary lifts his nun's robes in order to reveal male genitalia belief, someone in the audience blurted out: «Θέλωναμεκάνειςνανιώσωγυναίκα.» All of a sudden, the tension was dispelled as the audience was racked with peals of continuous laughter, elaborating upon Samuel Goldwyn's belief that while a wide screen makes a bad movie twice as bad, it can also make it twice as funny. It is of moments of these that our collective experience is comprised.

This year, the Film Festival offers up the usual cross section of modern Greek films, characterised as they are by their bleak though not completely nihilistic outlook on life, anarchic tendencies, incisive humour and uncompromising honesty. These perennial traits, which many of the older generations brought up on the more genteel mass productions of the fifties and sixties find so confronting, have formed the undercurrent of Greek film from its inception. As a retrospective, the Film Festival also showcases old favourites that have been loved and appreciated by cinema goers in previous festivals. Finally, and most importantly, the Festival showcases the efforts of Greek-Australian short film-makers, via the Greek-Australian Short Film Festival, one that deserves the same if probably not more attention. This is because the Festival provides us with a unique and valuable opportunity to analyse how Greek-Australians interpret the place of a culture that is inherited more than experienced, within an Australian context and how such interpretations can be expressed in visual form. Truly their films, to paraphrase Cocteau are a veritable fountain of thought and it is to the Greek Film Festival's credit that local films are given their deserved prominence.

It was the great Orson Welles who maintained that : "A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet." This is my selling pitch of Pygmalion, a film that deserves a Film Festival all of its own, for after all, Jean Luc Godard is right in maintaining that "Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world." It is to this fraudulent beauty that this year's Greek Film Festival offers a well needed and artful escape from convention and the daily chewing of the cud.

Saturday, November 09, 2013

PANHELLENIC GAMES

Not much survives the demise of the infamous Council of Greeks Abroad, also known as SAE. After a babble of world and local councils (babble being the collective known to describe such talkfests), after the disbursement of millions in order to fly and accommodate delegates from the various continents in Thessaloniki, the so-called world capital of Hellenes Abroad, after an inordinate amount of local skulduggery and jockeying in order to obtain a place in SAE, and so secure a free trip to the motherland, the whole unsteady edifice lies in a heap of smoking ruins, and this, especially after it was announced that the said organisation had to be self-funding.

Out of all the promises and rhetoric however, an unlikely survivor has emerged, one which encapsulates the spirit but not the inefficiency or political agendas of its parent organisation. This survivor is none other than the Panhellenic Games, whose recent games were held in Canberra, and were, according to all accounts, a resounding success.

The Panhellenic Games were a brainchild of SAE Oceania and were initially partly funded by the Greek government. It says much not only for the enduring importance of this institution but also of the SAE delegates who were involved in its organisation that after the dissolution of SAE, they saw fit, of their own volition, quietly and without the fanfare that usually accompanies office-bearers of community organisations, to continue to concern themselves with the perpetuation of the Games. As a result of their dedication, the Panhellenic Games have become a fixture on our community scene, on a Pan-Australian level, uniting young Greek-Australians in an unprecedented way.

Along the way, there have been teething problems. Earlier this year, groups of discontented newly arrived Greek migrants accused the organisers of the Games of deliberately excluding them from participating in the Games, going so far as to accuse them of discrimination. The Games organisers in turn responded by stating that while their focus is primarily to provide a forum for young Greek- Australians, largely disengaged with the organised community, to associate with each other, the inclusion of young Greek migrants in future Games is not necessarily precluded.

This small dispute illustrates the key significance of the Games. Some one hundred years after the founding or our communities and some fifty years after the commencement of Greek mass migration to this country, the community we term as Greek, is as diverse as never before. It is comprised of persons fluent in Greek and integrated within the community, others who have no contact with the Greek community apart from their own family and friends, those who are of Greek descent but do not speak the language and are not engaged or exposed to “Greek culture,” the surprisingly numerous non-Greek partners of Greeks who speak Greek and lately of course, recent arrivals from the beleaguered motherland. It is trite to mention that it is inordinately difficult to find an overarching identity for all these categories of Greeks, let alone serve their needs within the community.

This is because on the whole, our organised community purveys a form of Hellenism that is political in structure (engaging in brotherhood politics seems to have been the major pastime for many years) and agro-cultural in outlook. This means that if you aren’t interested in the annual Sardine or Ouzo festival, if you aren’t into Greek dancing, yawn at the sound of traditional Greek music or Greek attempts to ape western music cacophonously, do not blink at the mention of the poet Cavafy, can’t even spell Polytechnic let alone know what it is and are intimidated by the sound of a Greek language that is unfamiliar to you, there isn’t much that the Greek community has to offer you and chances are it will not embrace you, given that you don’t fit the salient criteria for inclusion within the ethno-cultural group.

The Panhellenic Games are therefore a most invaluable tessera within the mosaic of our broader Greek-Australian community. Sport has the capacity to transcend cultural, linguistic and other boundaries in a way that no other activity openly practised within the Greek community can. As such, the fact that the ancient Greeks used the ancient Olympics as a way of reaffirming a common identity between diverse tribes, should not escape us. Furthermore, given that in Australia sport is less of a pastime and more of a religion, it constitutes an ideal method to attract participation from those of Hellenic descent who feel excluded by or do not understand, other, more traditionally “Hellenic” pursuits.

Thus, at the recent Canberra Games, attended by young Greeks from throughout Australia, the participation by Greek-Australians of limited Greek language skills or of whom only one parent or grand-parent was Greek was noteworthy and encouraging. Such participants eagerly embraced the opportunity to meet and enjoy the company of others who call themselves Greek, engaging with the concept of an identity with which they may only have a passing acquaintance, possibly creating or deconstructing from that intercourse their own distinctive conception of a Greek identity, all the while, engaging in a pursuit that they enjoy, and feel comfortable with, without being imposed upon to act or speak a certain way. For those already possessed of various rudiments of Greek culture, the opportunity to socialise and compete with their peers was equally enjoyed.

The term Panhellenic encapsulates within it a lofty ideal, that of being open to all Hellenes. In a culture, at least here in Australia that has historically attempted to define itself by the exclusion of others, this is no easy task. The organisers of the Panhellenic Games are to be commended for their persistence in striving to achieve this ideal, abjuring lauds and publicity but carrying on what is effectively a ministry to the large corpus of the youth whose interests are not represented or engaged by the current pursuits or structures of the organised Greek community. Given the groundswell of grass-roots support for their endeavours, along with the well-deserved attention of various State Governments, it is quite likely that the Games will only expand in scope in the future.

If anything, the success of the Panhellenic Games teach us this: that we must constantly be in search of new methods to engage with an increasingly diversified Greek community. Our current organisations and structures present an antiquated view of the composition of our community. If some sense of cohesion is to be maintained, novel approaches catering to traditionally “non-Greek” interests must be explored and embraced. We leave you this week expressing the pious wish that at the re-convening of the without a doubt well attended next Panhellenic Games, a marathon event be introduced, compelling athletes to compete, clad, in Spiridon Louis fashion, in foustanella, while being chased by the protesting citizens of Berwick. May the games begin.

Monday, November 04, 2013

FORMER PROVINCE OF PUERILE PONTIFICATION

In complete disregard for Peter
Ekonomides feelings, he of the “Rebranding Greece” fame, the fair country of
Hellas has been rebranded. No longer is it to be called the “Hellenic
Republic,” or indeed “Greece” for unenlightened westerners. Those who fear that
Greece has been purchased by a Middle Eastern Airline for sponsorship purposes
can rest assured that it is not to labour under the soubriquet of the Republic
of Etihad, or indeed, Gulf Air Republic. Furthermore, Greece has not been
acquired by Richard Branson and renamed Bransonia, and though Greece is in
thrall to the Germans and the troika, technically Greece is not in liquidation,
so it has not yet been deemed necessary to offer the business name on the
market, though rumours that the name was offered but there were no takers,
abound.

Who then is our godfather? None
other than the president of Greece’s neighbour, Nikolass Gruevski, who in a
recent speech referred to our motherland as “Former Ottoman Province of
Greece.” No doubt what he was trying to do, is to give the Greeks a taste of
their own medicine and see how they like being referred to as the former
constituent of someone else’s country. What he has achieved, however, is to
emphasise for the umpteenth time, just how dispossessed of historical
knowledge, the fraternal governing clique at Skopje actually is. Such
ahistoricity is instructive, for it goes far in explaining why our northern
friends seem particularly facile at adopting historical identities not their
own and why no amount of rational argument will disabuse them of their misapprehensions.

In the interests then of
enlightening Mr Gruevski, it should be noted that in Ottoman times, there was
no Greece. Greece as an administrative entity had no existence in the Ottoman
consciousness. Instead, the lands now comprising the bulk of the modern Greek
state were known as Rumeli, that is, the land of the Romans. This is because
two millennia prior to the felicitous manifestation of Peter Ekonomides’
corporeal presence upon this earth, Greece underwent one of its most long-lived
and famous re-brandings. Having been conquered by the Romans, in the words of
Horace: “Captive Greece took captive her fierce conqueror, and introduced
her arts into rude Latium.” As a result, in no small thanks to Constantine
who moved the focus of the Roman Empire to the lands of the Greeks, the Greeks
found themselves inheriting the Empire that had stripped them of their liberty.
When one inherits the trappings of power, the next logical step is to assume
the identity of the source of that power and that is precisely what the Greeks
did, divesting themselves of the name Hellene, a name that in time came to
refer to an idol-worshipper and becoming Romans. They remained as Romans for
the next millennium, which is as long as the Byzantine Empire lasted and
retained the identifier “Romios,” well into the twentieth century. Thus, if Mr
Gruevski were to provide verisimilitude to his petulant attempt to perpetuate a
futile dispute, he should have referred to Greece alternatively as the Former
Ottoman Province of Rumeli.

Of course, if Gruevski were to go
further back in history, as those of his ilk are want to do, parading in their
town squares in plastic Roman armour that appears to have been derived from a
Royal Melbourne Show show-bag, he could also refer to our motherland as the
Federation of the Former Byzantine Themes of Thrace, Macedonia, Strymon,
Thessaloniki, Nikopolis, Peloponnesos, Kefallinia, Aegeon and of course Hellas,
this last theme comprising of Attica, Boetia and Thessaly. For the sake of
completeness, Mr Gruevksi could add to that the theme of Boulgaria, whose
capital at the time of Emperor Basil the Bulgar-Slayer, was Skoupoi, now known
as Skopje. Therefore, if the principle behind the schoolyard rhyme: “Tit for
tat, butter for fat, if you will kick my dog, I’ll kick your cat,” was to be
applied, we could soothe Mr Gruevski’s sensitivities by referred to FYROM as
the Former Byzantine theme of Boulgaria. There you go. Problem solved, or
rather re-branded.

Unlike Mr Gruevski, though we may
be unsecured vis a vis funds with which to discharge our financial obligations,
we are secure enough in our identity to call ourselves and be called any name
under the sun. We appear in the early Hittite texts as the pestiferous Ahiyyawa
or sea-peoples, raiding the coast of Asia Minor and creating mischief. Our
Cretan brethren appear in the Hebrew Bible as the dreaded and contentious
Philistines. In Homer, we appear variously as Danaans, Achaeans, Myrmidons and
with a myriad of other exotic appellations. Thus, we were re-branding Greece
long before theconcept was a
neurosynapse in Peter Ekonomides’ cerebellum or a shudder along the spine of
the incoherent Gruevski.

The very people who gave us the
name by which Gruevski refers to us, the Graecoi, were a mere tribe of Dorians
living in Epirus. Aristotle used the term Graikos in his Meteorologica and
claimed that it was the name originally used by the Illyrians for the Dorians
of Graii, the word deriving from the Greek word for an aged person. Homer,
while reciting the Boeotian forces in the Iliad's Catalogue of Ships, provides
the first known reference to a region named Graea, and Pausanias mentions that
the ancient city of Tanagra was for a time called Graea, adding that "no
one knows where this Graea really was. Aristotle thought it was near Oropus,
further east on the same coast as Delion. German classical historian Busolt
claimed that the name was given by the Romans originally to the Greek colonists
from Graea who helped to found Cumae the important city in southern Italy where
the Latins first encountered the Greeks and then to all Greeks, in yet another
non-Ekonomides bout of re-branding.

A similar form of re-branding
takes place in relation to the name Hellenes, which many uber-patriots prefer
as being more correct that that of “Greeks.” Aristotle also places ancient
Hellas in the region of Achelous river around Dodona in Epirus where in his
opinion the great deluge of Deucalion must have occurred. The priests of Zeus
in Dodona were called Selloi which could lead to Sellanes and then to
Hellanes-Hellenes. Hellenes in the wider meaning of the word appears in writing
for the first time in an inscription by Echembrotus, dedicated to Heracles for
his victory in the Amphictyonic Games, in the 48th Olympiad of 584 BC. After
the Greco-Persian Wars, an inscription was written in Delphi celebrating
victory over the Persians and calling Pausanias the leading general of the
Hellenes.

Hall, in his ground-breaking book
“Hellenicity” suggests that Hellenism may have been an aggregrative ethnicity
that operated across geographically contiguous regions to weld together a
transregional aristocracy against lesser status groups. According to him,
"Hellenicity" clearly emerges only in the fifth century B.C, and then,
rather than being a universally accepted identifier, was largely the production
of imperial Athens, which acted as "the new self-appointed arbiter of
cultural authenticity." Hellenic identity thus came to be measured
increasingly in terms of culture and education rather than of putative descent
groups through a process that reached its completion during the Hellenistic age.

Many scholars, Dr Vrasidas
Karalis prefer the term Panhellenes, meaning “all the Greeks,” which marks a
step away from 19th century monolithic and all-encompassing conceptions
of race, connoting in its stead, a confederation of individuals, which is
exactly what the highly individualistic Greek people are. Re-branding Greece in
this manner may serve to prise the ingenuity of the individual Greek from the
quagmire of a corrupt and dysfunctional state that acts as a barrier to further
development.

It was Elbert Hubbard who opined that: “If you can't answer
a man's arguments, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.” When
all is said and done, Mr Gruevski futile tantrums fail to incense a nation that
has far more important things to worry about that a mere title. No amount of
historical Viagra dispensed in the erection of kitsch statues of ancient
historical personages will serve to mask the true intellectualflaccidity of a Balkan backwater struggling
under the weight of competing nationalisms, to construct a coherent national
mythology. In this regard, perhaps the name dispute is the final, rapidly
de-magnetised pole upon which our northern friends can converge. The last word
of course, goes to the eternally fabulous Zsa Zsa Gabor, from which much can be
gleaned: “I call everyone 'Darling'
because I can't remember their names.” From the Disunited Unfederated Former
Republic of Darlings, this much greeting.

About Me

For more information on the Panepirotic Federation of Australia please write to:
55-57 Rupert St Collingwood VIC 3066
Ph: (03) 9416 4177
Member organisations:
Union of Northern Epirotes.
Konitsa Association of Melbourne
Cultural League of Epirus
Youth League of Epirus
Committee of Solidarity for the Greeks of Northern Epirus